Al Stewart to join Dave Mason at Keswick acoustic show

Al Stewart claims he spends a lot of time getting paid to drag equipment around airports. To hear him tell it, he’s just a glorified hotel porter who sings a few songs in the evening.

Sure, he spends a lot of time packing and unpacking on the way to various gigs, then he spends a lot of time sitting around all day waiting to play his music. In the span of 72 hours, he’ll sing and play guitar for all of about 75 minutes.

But don’t believe him — especially the part about him only being a glorified hotel porter. That’s because Al Stewart is more than that.

Much more.He’s a songwriter and a poet — along the lines of Bob Dylan — with an unwavering and significant thirst for history and wordplay and the musical chops to still be pulling it off nearly five decades after he picked up his first guitar.

As part of the British folk revival of the 1960s and 1970s, Stewart had released six studio albums from 1967 through 1975 before he hit it big with the album “Year of the Cat” in 1976, which reached No. 6 on the Billboard charts, fueled by the hit single title track, which peaked at No. 8 in the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977.

It’s an album and a song that people still talk about today. And local fans will get a chance to revisit it when Stewart joins Dave Mason on the bill for an acoustic show at 8 p.m. Friday, April 6, at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside.

“Nobody buys records anymore, so pretty much everyone has gone back to doing live work, which is what you should be doing anyway if you’re a singer-songwriter,” said Stewart in a recent telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles. “You should write songs and you should go somewhere and sing them. Otherwise, by definition, you’re not living up to your billing.”

Stewart, 67, said it’s great that people still call and want him to perform because he had no idea that he’d still be doing this at his age.

To put that in perspective, the Scottish-born folk-rock musician said that when he left school in the 1960s, his headmaster made it clear to him, as did all the newspapers in England at the time, that this “rock and roll fad” would only last six months.

“But it has lasted 50 years and I think that’s incredible,” he said.

A prolific songwriter who has always loved to sprinkle characters from history into his songs, Stewart’s legacy remains “Year of the Cat” and its subsequent follow-up album and single, “Time Passages,” which reached No. 7 on the Billboard charts in 1978.

“I was fairly certain we were going to have a Top 20 album with ‘Year of the Cat.’ But I didn’t think I would have a hit single because I never had one up to that point. But I thought probably would make the Top 20 and I thought it would probably sell a quarter of a million copies, and that sounded really good to me,” said Stewart. “The thing I never saw coming was that it would be a hit single.”

Stewart said that he’s grateful that he was part of the generation that grew up with what he calls “plastic records” — vinyl albums — and that if he had been born in another era, he would have been less likely to have had music be his “life’s work.”

“Bob Dylan was asked if he would go into the music business now if he was just starting out and he said, “Absolutely not.’ If I had been born in 1893 or 2013, I wouldn’t have had the benefit of the world of plastic records,” said Stewart.

“I’ve always loved them and I’ve always loved everything about them. On that level, we were all very lucky we were part of that generation.”

Throughout the years, Stewart has stuck to two basic approaches when it comes to songwriting: (1) “Don’t write about anything that anyone else has ever written about because originality in the key.” (2) “Don’t use words that anyone else uses. That way, you’re bound to be original.”

Still, Stewart maintains that even after all these years, he’d play for free, but that’s he’s actually paid for dragging equipment around airports.

“The playing is just one tiny little part of what I do,” said Stewart. “Do I love sitting on airplanes? No. But I still love to play music.”

If you go: Al Stewart will perform at the Keswick Theatre, Easton Road and Keswick Avenue,Glenside, Friday, April 6, at 8 p.m.

Tickets are $29.50 to $45. For information, call 215-572-7650 or visit www.keswicktheatre.com.